Why do citizens choose to comply with the state? Democracies rely on a great deal of voluntary compliance to govern effectively. Voting is voluntary in most democracies, and even for state demands with legal penalties such as taxes or conscription, the impossibility of universal monitoring means that states count on most citizens to comply on their own. Thus, widespread citizen willingness to engage in state affairs has long been recognized as a hallmark of well-functioning democracies.
While existing answers focus almost exclusively on the payoffs of compliance, this dissertation introduces a different framework based on the ethical power of communities. Special communities such as the nation often instill a sense of responsibility to contribute to their welfare – a communal duty. When the state is seen as representing one’s nation, this communal duty provides an ethical reason to comply with the political needs of the state.
I develop the communal model through a comparative analysis of three forms of democratic compliance – voting, paying taxes, and serving in the military – in two East Asian democracies. South Korea and Taiwan make a unique pairing because historical contentions predating democracy resulted in contrasting relationships between the nation and state. I substantiate the micro-foundations of the model using existing and original public opinion surveys, a pair of survey and field experiments, and narrative citizen interviews.
To externally validate the findings outside of East Asia, a region where cultural values of collective responsibility are particularly salient, I extend the communal model to a compliance puzzle on the other side of the world in unified Germany. Finally, I conclude with a broad cross-national test across more than a dozen advanced democracies.
The dissertation turns on its head the common assumption that sticky communal attachments hinder democratic governance by showing an unexpected way in which they contribute to democracies. In many cases, nations – and the ethical commitments they instill – are a significant part of what sustains the sense of citizen duty that all democracies need.